


The Center Cannot Hold

by stilitana



Category: Watchmen (2009), Watchmen (Comic), Watchmen - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Gender Changes, F/F, F/M, Fix-It of Sorts, Functional Dysfunction, Gender Issues, Mental Instability, Polyamory, Polyamory Negotiations, Post-Karnak, Rorschach Has Issues
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-12-11
Updated: 2017-12-11
Packaged: 2019-02-13 07:49:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,904
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12979449
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/stilitana/pseuds/stilitana
Summary: If it were not for the mask beneath the face Rorschach would be dead.Rorschach might be dead anyway.When Dan betrays his partner at the most critical moment three unlikely survivors are left to face the fallout together because all they have left is each other.(Or: The story of how three outlaws find something that isn't love but which will suffice in its absence and manage, in a world where a happy ending is impossible, to still get up in the morning anyway.)





	The Center Cannot Hold

**Author's Note:**

> This arose from my thoughts on how much gender influences Rorschach's character and how certain situations may have played out were things to be reversed. I recognize this trio may seem like a stretch but give it a chance. Desperate times are great catalysts for otherwise difficult to imagine behavior.
> 
> Whatever warnings apply to the source material may apply here, albeit to what is likely a much lesser extent.  
> I do not own Watchmen and am not profiting from this story.
> 
> "Turning and turning in the widening gyre   
> The falcon cannot hear the falconer;   
> Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;   
> Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,   
> The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere   
> The ceremony of innocence is drowned;   
> The best lack all conviction, while the worst   
> Are full of passionate intensity."  
> \--W.B. Yeats

The men came as close to touching as they could without really doing it. She did not realize this, not really, until many years later, until she was someone else entirely. She was Vanda Kovacs then in the low light of the dingy apartment with dirty dishwater colored drapes and sheets that couldn’t get clean no matter what, and everything was always musty and musky and damp, even down in her lungs, some wet black phlegm in the air caught in there that no amount of coughing or clearing her throat could dislodge. Some kind of bacterial infection that remained nameless because going to the doctor was something somebody else did, nobody she knew, but it left her throat sore and scratchy and her voice crackly forever like a bad radio connection and if she talked too much or too loudly she lost it entirely for weeks at a time so she kept things curt.

She was Vanda in the apartment, stretched out nightshirt hanging off one shoulder with all the decorum of an alley cat. There was something feral about the child. She had murky, dark little eyes that gleamed like something nocturnal when they caught the light just right from the shadows. She was Wanda later after the boys in the street and all the bloody knuckles and the correctional school but by then it didn’t much matter because there was no one to call her anything at all. She was just Kovacs by day in the factory and she liked that just fine, just Kovacs, because it was anonymous, nothing gendered in a surname, though she’d have chosen a different one if she could have. This one had a dirty streak that screamed of grubby red Eastern European Soviet Bloc states, of anti-American ideologies, of communes and beggars and harsh garbled Slavic sounds she still heard sometimes in her dreams and hearing them was like sucking a thumb, perversely comforting and to be done in private only. It othered her, it placed her in ways she did not want to be placed. It stamped her as imported. No. As far as Wanda Kovacs was concerned she had sprung up out of a crack in the New York concrete fully formed.

She was Rorschach in the night cutting a line right down the middle through the heart of man because it really was that simple, as simple as coring an apple, it truly was that black and white. There were good men and there were evil men and everyone knew the difference when they saw it, deep down. Nevermind that her mind could split at a moment’s notice, building someone up on a pedestal one second only to light that same tower ablaze or tear it down with hands and teeth moments later. There were good men and there were bad men. The good ones did good. The bad did evil. If there was a gray space it was merely the split second when a good man turned rotten. It did not happen so much the other way around. Much harder to get a stain out than to ruin something forever.

Daniel thinks she is a man. No, no, that’s not it. Daniel assumes that Rorschach is a man and mistakenly thinks her face and her mask have that much in common. The truth is Rorschach is not human at all. Rorschach is the monster under her bed she grew up and learned to harness to do what everyone else was to squeamish for even if they knew it was necessary. Rorschach was some other kind of creature entirely, was the amorphous being she’d always longed to be when she felt trapped in a rotting hunk of meat that was taking her down with it. 

It did not bother her if Daniel wanted Rorschach to be a man. She understood. A good woman should be indoors anyway, guarding the homefront, because god knows the men weren’t doing so. The city shared Daniel’s assumption and this bought her the kind of respect she could spend her entire life as Wanda working to death for and never achieve, and this way it was effortless, was given freely, cost her nothing but to keep up the charade. This was armor of another kind. Nite Owl had his bulletproof plating and she had her layers upon layers and masks upon masks and an identity as the opposite sex that swaddled her more safely than she’d ever been.

Of course this had its strange side effects. Namely upon the whores who saw fit to bare their breasts to her, to jeer and mock and taunt and tempt her. The first few times she broke out in a cold sweat and hunched her shoulders, plowed faster down the alley as they leered out of the shadows and alcoves like demons in funhouse mirrors, all soft sagging flesh clad in sheer thin fabrics she could feel like phantoms, all clad in stockings she may have stitched herself and this made her mouth dry as she made the mistake of looking full on at one particular prostitute, caught the gleam of buckles and studs and thought, my hands were on those garters, on all that silk and frothy filthy lace, and the whore laughed and laughed because all whores were Cassandras, were oracles and witches and seers spewing prophecy, all of them gifted with clairvoyance and they could see into her head and she knew that they knew and she knew they knew she knew they knew that beneath the trench and the mask (it was still a mask then,) that she was just like them, slick beneath the legs and trembling, and they were sharing an inside joke with her but the punchline felt like the most loving knife slid tenderly and visciously right between her ribs, perfectly, with the kind of careful precision only equal parts of love and malice brings about.

So she stopped looking and rushing. After a while she perfected the trick she’d used as little Vanda in the apartment with all those men who made noises, who made her mother cry and pant and wail. The men and the demon-women became like ghosts in a dream to her, like smog that might just dissipate if she walked through with enough certainty.

After the Roche case she went away for a little while and after Daniel came with the Silk Monstrosity to bust her out of Sing Sing she came back, or somebody else did anyway. Someone for whom the lines were a little harder to slice right down the middle, somebody who could see plainly the world was grey on grey but couldn’t get the black and white out of her own head, couldn’t stop trying to separate hues and parse some kind of system out of all that bedlam.

So they’d seen her photo and knew her name. That much must have been on the news, some bleak little mugshot of a snub-nosed, jug-eared, runtish troll of a girl with hair she’d cut herself, hair she shorn off every four months or so with a pair of old clippers. She’d tried styling it once, bought a pair of little silver scissors on a whim and left it long on top, let it fade gently into the stubble above her ears. It fell across her head in little red tufts because she’d washed it and now it hardly felt like hair but was like the soft pelt of a rabbit she’d pet once, in a store or sideshow attraction. The person in the mirror made her eyes itch and her throat get tight and she didn’t know why. It was the feeling she got whenever she thought she might have been somebody once, a whole person, might have been bearable to look at, might’ve been worth something before it all got ruined. Damaged goods. It wasn’t a man or a lady’s haircut because it was on her and she didn’t know what the hell she was. She’d cut herself down the middle, too. There was Rorschach and there was Wanda and this way she could all exist but not all at once and that was the problem, the overlap that had to be carefully trimmed back or else...or else things got weird and she had to own up to the fact that she was some half-formed in-between creature that never could make up its mind about what it was, couldn’t quite wrap its head around the idea of being anything at all.

“So,” Laurie said, and Wanda was doing her very best not to look at her. “Wanda Kovacs, huh?”

Rorschach only grunted in reply and prayed to god she could keep getting away with that for as long as there was left, which wasn’t looking to be very long.

And it wasn’t. Out in the snow she ripped off the face and there she was, masks upon masks. She’d worn and been stripped of so many, and at bottom no face, just the bare skull, and then she knew what she was which was nothing because she was about to be obliterated and the arctic wind was flaying her and she felt it between her cells and she was revealing herself, she was an open wound that never scabbed over.

Of course Jon had known all along and it hadn’t mattered in the end.

Her body betrayed her in one way she’d never imagined when it stopped Daniel from allowing her to die with dignity.

One minute she was roaring out of her body with all the empty, wasted fury of a glory-blind saint about to be martyred, screaming do it to the closest thing to god she’d ever known, and the next she was face down in the snow, cheek pressed to the searing white ground with all of Daniel’s considerable bulk on top of her and he was yelling something, blubbering, covering her easily. She was swallowed up. That was in a way what she’d wanted, but not like this, not to be marked and claimed and tackled to the ground like some piece of meat for two dogs in an alley to —

Sometimes her brain jumped a circuit and had to take a moment to boot itself up again. 

When she came to Daniel was still gibbering like some half-mad lover in a Hollywood film who’d be locked up in real life. She was numb and it wasn’t just on account of the snow. She had no fight left. She’d bet every ounce of life and willpower on that gamble, had bet on obliteration, so there was nothing left to fight this violation with.

She floated outside her body as they, as Daniel and Laurie, hustled her back to the Archimedes, smothered her in the big white coat and sat her down, manhandled her like a storefront mannequin. This was everything she’d never wanted and she didn’t have it in her to say a word, to lift a finger. She let them hurry her away from the scene as though out of sight, out of mind could ever apply to men like Jon and Adrian, as though they could smuggle her out like contraband and keep her in a lockbox like a little pet.

They left the tundra in silence, or maybe that was just the ringing in her ears, the blood rushing up warm and wet and deafening. 


End file.
